Getting the world to switch to XML didn't work?

Tim Berners-Lee is a British national treasure. He is the de facto inventor of the World Wide Web. If I've understood (correctly) the research I've done this morning the creation of hypertext is generally credited to Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart. Tim linked the idea of hypertext to the DNS and TCP protocols of the internet as he developed and designed the HTML language and - ta-da! — the World Wide Web was born. [DNS is about how computers find each other and TCP is about how computers exchange data with each other]. Tim built the first web browser, editor and web server. He created the first listing of other websites (which I guess is the forerunner of Yahoo).

Today Tim is director of the World Wide Web Consortium (or W3C) and you've probably guessed by now that he has a blog; on which I read this morning that something is up in the world of HTML standards. The first thing I hadn't realised was that the underlying specification for HTML hasn't changed since Xmas Day 1999, and Tim goes on to talk about setting up a new group to move the HTML specification on in small steps in the direction of a well-formed language, without explicitly stating that the destination is XML.

I thought this was the killer quote in what Tim said:

Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world.

I wonder what the blogosphere will say today about how well the switch to XML has worked. I'll be monitoring the conversation on Techmeme.

Tags: HTML, XML, W3C